


The Night Has Music

by 852_Prospect_Archivist



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-10
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-11 01:31:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/792485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/852_Prospect_Archivist/pseuds/852_Prospect_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim finally gives in to the music.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Night Has Music

**Author's Note:**

> No real plot, sort of a stream on consciousness thing.

## The Night Has Music

by Elizabeth Clarke

Author's webpage: <http://www.geocities.com/meclarke_99/>

Author's disclaimer: Not mine. Like all of you, I wish they were.

* * *

Four years ago I cursed these senses, certain I was going crazy. I'd forgotten my time in Peru. Forgotten how, after the first few days how natural it seemed to use them. 

Natural. Soothing. 

The jungle is a far from silent place, but once its rythymns are learned, once each sight and sound and scent has a name, the gestalt is a ...balm. 

Reassuring. Comforting. 

Music. 

The sound of rain on the tree canopy overhead, the sigh of a breeze, the scream of a jaguar. 

The sigh of a lover, satisfied and satisfying, lying in your arms, replete. 

Music. 

I'd had lovers before, but Incacha was my first true lover, my first male lover. I've had lovers since, male and female, but it was never the same. 

There was no music. 

My senses went away when I left the jungle. Was it grief? Guilt? Despair? 

Grief for leaving my lover? Guilt for leaving a people who had become my own? Despair for the loss of the music? 

I came back to Cascade. I found a duty station, and with it, the desire and ability to rebel. 

I had no lover, only willing bodies, and a wife too like myself. 

I had no people to whom I belonged, only bodies I had to 'catch'. 

There was no music, only sound. 

Until one day the barriers broke again - but not ...naturally, this time. This time they were born of anger and frustration, isolation. This time there was no Incacha to explain and sooth. 

I didn't 'remember' Incacha. 

And then He came, and if I didn't remember Incacha consciously, then somewhere there must have been a sense memory, because I became a battlefield. 

Part of me recognized him - his voice, his scent, his body - and I had never seen him before. Part of me welcomed his intrusion into my life \- actually yearned for the sound of his voice in my ears, his scent in my nose, his taste on my tongue, his body beneath my hands. 

Part of me rejected him. Part of me told me how foolish it was to want this young man. Part of me remembered the pain of losing something I could not remember. 

Part of me remembered losing the music. None of me wanted to lose it again. 

We came together, as friends, as partners. 

He became my guide and I followed him. 

We were never lovers. 

I mourned the music. 

And then ,one day, Incacha came to me, and I remembered him. 

The jungle, the night, and the music. 

But it was not the same. 

The jungle became the city, the trees cement buildings. The smell of rain became pollution, the jaguar's cry the sound of traffic. 

Incacha became Blair. 

Straight black hair became curly brown locks. Black eyes glinting with humor became deep and sparkling blue. A trained and wiry body became a compact form with slender muscles. Brown skin became olive-toned. 

A body I had known intimately became one I had never known. 

The music beckoned two ways, and I could choose neither. 

Death came, and the choice was made for me. 

A song ended, another waited to begin, but I refused to listen. 

If I could not hear it, it did not exist. If it did not exist, it could not be lost. 

If the instrument plays the written score, but the audience doesn't listen, has the music truly been played? 

And still I was a battlefield. A heart, a mind, a soul in conflict. 

Always, always, it has been easier not to acknowledge want, to refuse to hear the music, for the music was playing, whether I listened or not. 

I fought against it harder. I would not listen, I could not listen. 

I rejected the music; I fled from it. 

Until I heard it, in its absence, and I realized I had been listening to it all along. 

I ran after it; I called after it; I prayed to it; I cursed it. 

My lost lover, my Incacha, came to me and showed me how to summon the music back to me; and so I called to it one more time. 

The music of my nights returned for me, and to me, joyously. In the morning I ran from it. 

It was too much; it overwhelmed me. I turned from the music and ran toward duty, torn with longing, afraid to listen. 

Again my lover-who-had-been returned to me, to show me the path. Since I would not listen to the Music, he showed me Light. 

And the Light and the Music were the same. 

I longed for the Light as I longed for the Music, with all my heart and soul and body; but still, I feared. Even as I listened to it, distantly, I rejected it. 

To listen to the Music, to live in the Light, is to risk becoming blind and deaf when the Music and the Light are lost, as they would surely be lost, as they had been lost before. 

This loss would be greater. 

So I believed myself safe from the Music and safe from the Light until ... 

... until the Light and the Music betrayed me, became Darkness and Dissonance, but I accepted them, as I had rejected the Light and the Music, for they were old, familiar friends, and I had been expecting them. 

I waited for Peace to come, the peace of realized pain, but it did not come. 

Instead, that which I'd rejected in fear came to me, transformed, and wearing a disguise. 

I realized that what I'd thought to be Music was the tiniest thread of a simple melody compared to this symphony, the Light the merest flicker of a candle next to the burning heart of a sun. 

How had I lived without this? How had I mistaken it so badly? 

Why did I have to recognize it ,only to know I had truly and finally lost it? 

I had forgotten that the music seeks its listener as the instrument its player. 

He came to me, freely and completely, willingly, and with love. 

One look from me in the security of our home, and he gave me the answer to every question I could never ask. 

He was mine. He had always been mine, he would always be mine. 

There had been no others before me, there would be no others after me. 

Heart and soul, mind and body. Mine. 

I held out my hand and he took it. I guided and he followed. 

I held him within my arms, he filled the hollow of my heart. 

I awoke first, lying in my bed after sleeping, having only slept. There would be time for the rest, soon. 

He lay with his back to my chest, my arm over him, our fingers entwined, our legs tangled, my nose in his hair. 

I heard his soft breath, the beating of his heart. 

Music. Glorious music. 

Soon we would add harmony to the melody. 

Sounds of passion, racing hearts, the slide of skin against skin. 

The small cry he would make as I enter him, uniting us, completing us. 

Night music. The music of love. 

* * *

End

 


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